As I use Painless Vim, I feel like your are there learning with me rather than standing on the other side of my desk spouting information at me. Your style is very readable and that counts for so much, especially when covering a complex tool such as Vim... What I want and have found in Painless Vim is learning that is fun. --Andy Staab

Painless Vim [is] an excellent way to get acquainted with a very powerful editor. It also now includes a very well-designed and quick-to-scan cheat sheet. It’s one of the most helpful I’ve seen.—Brett Terpstra

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Vim (But Were Afraid to Ask) #painlessvim by @PogiNate

— Gábor (@gaborpro) June 11, 2014

Painless Vim is written by a professional developer who tried to learn vim a number of times before it finally stuck. I kept falling into the same cycle: I'd read a wide a array of books, online tutorials, print-outs, go through all their steps, and in the end get almost nowhere. Then I'd quietly go back to my editor of choice until next time I decided to try it out.

It wasn't until I started abusing the patience of a fellow developer who was a few months ahead of me on the vim learning curve that I came to finally understand how much power vim actually has to offer. He didn't try to tell me that I had to do everything "the vim way" or even that I had to give up my favorite editor. Instead he quietly and kindly gave me pointers that I could understand, advice I could appreciate, and encouragement to keep trying. With his help I was surprised how quickly I got comfortable with vim, and how much faster I've been ever since.

And now I want to pass that kind of learning along. Painless Vim starts with the understanding that you're an intelligent, busy person who has to get actual work done along with learning a new text editor. This book is designed to help you get comfortable with vim incrementally, without demanding that you toss your mouse out the window and disable all the keyboard shortcuts you've learned over the years. The goal is to introduce you to the 20% of vim that you'll use most often first, and give you pointers to the 80% you'll use less often when you're ready to explore.

Painless Vim is also designed to be short, easy to read, and inexpensive, so you can learn quickly and painlessly if vim is for you, without slogging through 500 pages or shelling out a ton of money just to go back to your editor of choice. I think you'll like this book, and I think that before too long you'll find that using vim is actually fun and that learning it was, well, painless.